Social Media

Netflix Prize: And the $1 Million Winner Is...?

Last month, we wrote about the Netflix Prize, a contest where developers and engineers are challenged to improve the Netflix movie recommendations system by 10%. Nobody could do it in 2007 or 2008, but this year, team BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos (composed of engineers from AT&T, Commendo, Pragmatic Theory, and Yahoo Research) broke the 10% threshold and guaranteed that someone would win the prize.

However, that wasn't the end because all the teams got 30 days to surpass BellKor's achievement (a buffer period). Today was the last day of the contest, and the Netflix Prize closed in dramatic fashion as BellKor and another team, The Ensemble, duked it out to see who could obtain the best score. So, which team just became millionaires?

Unfortunately, the answer is: we don't know yet. Yes, it's clear that the leaderboard shows that The Ensemble have the best score, 10.10%, compared to BellKor's 10.09% improvement on Netflix's movie recommendation algorithms. However, the prize is based on two scores, not just one. The other set, the "test subset," isn't public and the winner of that side won't be revealed until the grand prize is given out in the next few weeks.

We do know that one of these two teams is going to be very disappointed in the next few weeks. Still, the contest was an exciting one and it has been an interesting and fun way to improve recommendation technology. Here's the final leaderboard:

What's Hot

More in Social Media

What's New

What's Rising

What's Hot

Mashable
is a leading global media company that informs, inspires and entertains the digital generation. Mashable is redefining storytelling by documenting and shaping the digital revolution in a new voice, new formats and cutting-edge technologies to a uniquely dedicated audience of 42 million monthly unique visitors and 24 million social followers.